MidgetMania; 300 Million. The United States has recently become more interested in, not to say fascinated by, midgets than at any time since the filming of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Why is that? Midgets are almost entirely absent from the real world that almost all of us live in, but are very much part of 'entertainment' media, from GEICO commercials to Jackass (the movie) II.
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In the Wizard of Oz era, the Nation understood dwarfs (or "dwarves"), who were then much more commonly called "midgets", to be oddities of Nature. It might have been rude to treat them as freaks, but everyone did in fact accept that they were freaks (as the American Heritage Dictionary now defines that term, "An abnormally formed organism, especially a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity").
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In recent decades we have become too 'sensitive' to other people's feelings to call anyone a "freak", even if they clearly are. A bearded lady, fat lady or tiny, tiny midget is now just "different", and not to be judged. That is the mentality that caused us as a society to accept Walter Hudson's weighing 1,500 pounds and not 'judging' him or demanding he lose weight. He died because we didn't want to call him a disgusting, self-centered, freakish montrosity who needed to grow the hell up.
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We don't want to 'judge' people and find them 'deformed', 'abnormal', 'defective', or anything else negative.
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But dwarfism is a terrible, terrible defect, and should be eliminated from the gene pool by sterilization of anyone who might, thru genetics, produce another dwarf. We have refused to do that, with the consequence that dwarfs have indeed produced more dwarfs, as progeny, ruining the lives of tiny babies who become only tiny people, never full-size human beings.
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We need to stop being so disgustingly, destructively indulgent of egoistic defectives, and tell them, "Hey! You are profoundly, disgustingly, offensively defective. We will NOT allow you to pass on your disgusting defect and make some other child's life a misery. We will NOT let you reproduce. If you will not use birth control with every single (hetero)sexual contact, then we will castrate or spay you. We will NOT permit you to attack the human race with your subhuman defect."
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One observer of one of the present TV programs that focuses on what we dishonestly call "Little People" — as tho they are only scaled-down normal people rather than profoundly, and sometimes life-threateningly, deformed creatures — says, online:

Don't you know that it's rude to stare? The makers of TLC's [cable station The Learning Channel's] reality series Little People, Big World do, which is the key to its appeal. On one level, it offers an up-close, unsentimental look at a family headed by a dwarf couple, spreading the positive message that little people can argue over money, coach youth soccer, and shoot tin cans off rocks like anyone else. On another level, though, it wallows in what it purportedly deplores, allowing us to feel good about ourselves while we gawk at this unusual-looking family from the privacy of our living rooms.

As the father of a teenage girl with dwarfism, I welcome media images that portray little people as normal.

That articulate, but, fundamentally, utterly dishonest person talks about "little peole" as tho the only way they are "different" is that they are smaller than normal people, tho of course he is averse to the word "normal" unless it embraces his midget dauter. He concedes that:

Dwarfs are rare: Depending on how you define the condition, there may be as few as 50,000 in the United States. Then, too, there is a certain cognitive dissonance in seeing adults who have some of the physical characteristics of children—the short stature, of course, but also disproportionately short arms and legs and slightly enlarged heads.

That, too, is dishonest. Dwarfs do not have "the physical characteristics of children". They have physical characteristics of the deformed. The father in the show Little People, Big World, walks with crutches! Is that because of a temporary injury or because he is permanently so deformed that he needs crutches to function normally?
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I suffered a very serious injury due to a fall from a ladder two days before the national trauma/tragedy of 9/11. 9/9 was my personal trauma/tragedy, and I have had 3 knee surgeries since then that forced me to use at least one crutch for more than a month at a time. But I don't need a crutch now. Has the father in LP, BW outgrown the need for crutches? If not, why on Earth would we pretend, dishonestly, that he is "normal"?
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Defectives of any type need to accept that they are defective. I can't walk rite. I am now defective. I wasn't for the first 56 years of my life, but I am now. I don't play silly games with reality. I can just barely walk down stairs face-forward. Until then, I had to go backwards, one step at a time. I can't run, I can't jog, I can barely maintain myself uprite on a downward slope without being constantly on guard against falling. I do not pretend to be physically normal, but I'm nearly 62 years old. It must be extremely difficult for someone whose dauter is a teenager, facing decades of abnormality, to accept, for her, and to urge her to accept, that she is abnormal. But she IS abnormal, and nothing he can say or pretend will alter that fact to even the slitest degree.
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Defectives must accept their defectiveness. It doesn't matter whether they are diabetics or hemophiliacs or cripples of a thousand different kinds; midgets or albinos; blind or deaf. Face facts, no matter how 'unkind' those facts may seem, and don't push off onto others the obligation to accept as "normal" people who are defective. Blindness is not normal; deafness is not normal; dwarfism is not normal. And it doesn't matter how many people pretend that any of those conditions is normal. Blind people, deaf people, deformed little midgets will always have a tuf time in life, not because other people wish it upon them but just because their horrible natural condition does that to them. If we had it within our power to make them normal, do not doubt for an instant that we would. If they, or misguided relatives or friends say that they wouldn't accept an instant fix even if it were available, let the world know, and acknowledge very publicly and very loudly, that they are out of their minds.
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300 Million — Rite. The Learning Channel reports that today is the day, when the population of the United States passes 300 million. Oh, please, we've had 300 million, legal and illegal, for at least five years. So what?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,771 — for Israel.) Oddly, yesterday's total was 1 higher than today's. There appears to have been a little correction




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:53 AM